Leon Bridges … seemingly transported from a more innocent age. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Leon Bridges looks startling. He saunters into an east London courtyard, clad in high-waisted trousers and a lightweight suede jacket, clutching his guitar case. His hair is impeccably sculpted. He’s like a walking, talking Instagram. The only imperfection is a small scar millimetres away from his right eye, the result of some other kid throwing a battery at him when he was nine. People glance at him as they walk past, because they probably can’t see him without thinking he is Something – an actor, a model maybe, the kind of person who was born to be pictured in magazines.

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In fact, he’s a soul singer, seemingly transported from a more innocent age, when girls were “cutie pies” and you escaped your small town by riding the railroad. His debut album, Coming Home, sounds as if he’d tried to imagine what the characters in Dirty Dancing might have been listening to when they were off screen.

“At the beginning, people didn’t understand it,” he says of his style, “especially in Fort Worth, Texas. They see a young black man wearing high-waist pants, up to his nipples, and shirt tucked in, and they’re just [his voice ascends to an astonished falsetto] ‘WHA’???????’ But eventually they started to respect it.”

There has never been a drought of performers reverting to the classic soul of the 60s – Amy Winehouse and Duffy sold millions doing so; in the US, the Daptone and Truth and Soul stables have released scores of great records to cult audiences. But Bridges is a rarity – a young, black, American singer being groomed for commercial success by Columbia Records by reverting to the past. He’s also one of a number of US artists poking their heads above the radar with a classic soul style.

Last year, St Paul and the Broken Bones reached No 56 in the Billboard charts with their debut album; over the past five years, Fitz and the Tantrums have gained a reputation as a thrilling live band, their last album cracking the US top 30; Curtis Harding released a critically acclaimed debut solo album earlier this year, and got himself on to Later … With Jools Holland; most successful of all have been the Alabama Shakes, whose first album went gold in both the US and UK, and whose second, Sound & Color, topped the US charts earlier this year.

“We are saturated on radio by a certain sound that delivers to earbuds and people are attuned to it having to be beaty,” says Jeff Smith, the director of music at Radio 2, which has playlisted many of these new soul artists. “Now people are railing against that beats sounds and looking to have something that means more lyrically.”

But there’s something else that links those artists, other than a certain Radio 2-friendliness: all of them have got their leg-ups via the indie scene, rather than having anything to do with contemporary R&B. Jack White has acted as a patron saint to Alabama Shakes and Harding, and both Harding and Bridges have worked closely with garage rockers – the Black Lips’ Cole Alexander in the former’s case, Austin Jenkins of White Denim with the latter.

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“When Austin first saw me play, he came up to me and was like, ‘Let’s make a record,’” Bridges says. It was Jenkins who produced Bridges’ album and recruited his live band. “They’re all guys I knew who’d played in different projects and we hung around town a little bit. We weren’t super close, but they were all guys I knew.” Bridges says his only stricture to them was that they wear suits on stage, to fit in with the aesthetic he’d been developing even before he started writing songs, and long before Jenkins became involved, and before he was picked up by his management firm. He had already been making music under the name Lost Child, but when he switched to classic soul, he reverted to his birth surname, Bridges, adopting the first name Leon because he shared his real name, Todd Bridges, with an actor. Almost immediately, he says, “I made my Instagram consistent, with black-and-white photos and good photography – the photographer Rambo reached out to me and we became close.”

Harding became involved with the Atlanta garage rock scene after moving back to the city following a spell living in Toronto. He’d previously made hip-hop, been in a band called the Constellations, and sung back-up with Cee-Lo Green, but that time in Toronto enabled him to refocus himself. “One of the first things I did was go and buy a guitar and write songs,” he tells me. “Being away from the business side and being a regular old Joe again taught me that you should always try to remain as down to earth as you could possibly allow yourself to be [and not] get caught up in the hype of trying to be popular.”

Bridges is frank about having no grounding in classic soul – his first soul song, Lisa Sawyer, which is about his mother, prompted a friend to ask if he’d been inspired by Sam Cooke, whose music he had not yet heard at that point – and says he decided to pursue his direction when he realised “there’s a void out there, there’s no black men making this kind of music. The only person I knew that was bringing it was Raphael Saadiq. It really spoke to me, so I really studied it, listening to it and looking at the blueprint, and wrote my idea of what a soul song sounds like.”

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Harding, by contrast, says he’d grown up with many different kinds of music – “that’s how I got my multi-culture vibe and my multi-genre vibe and my amazing outlook on soul” – and soul felt like a natural avenue to journey down. “Blues and soul is something I can do for ever, and I’m pretty good at it. I can always find something new everyday within those 12 notes.”

The pair are a decade apart in age – Bridges is 25, Harding 35 – but there are similarities in their backgrounds, especially their religious upbringing. Harding’s mother was a gospel singer, and he went on the road with her singing back-up until he was 15 (“I couldn’t really tell you when I started. I was just that young”), with the young Curtis “going to different schools in different areas of different cities”. They’d play any church of any denomination. “We’d stay as long as was required for her to get her point across. Sometimes a year, sometimes two, sometimes a few months.”

Though Bridges was settled in Fort Worth, his mother was extremely devout and disapproved of secular music. “Even though she didn’t allow it, I’d still turn on the radio. But I didn’t have any albums,” he says. “I remember when me and my mom were pulling up at the mall once and an R&B band from back in the day called Profile came on the radio. It was one of my favourite songs, and she let it play for a while. Then she turned it off and I was like, ‘Damn!’”

Bridges loved Ginuwine and Usher, and went off to college to study dance. “One day I was hanging out in the dance hall and somebody came up to me: ‘Hey! There’s this guy who’s brought his keyboard and everybody’s gathering around and singing songs in the cafeteria.’ I went over there and they were taking turns singing, and I saw an open door to show people I could sing. When it was my turn, I sung a couple of things and someone was like, ‘Man, you got a great voice.’” That, Bridges says, is when he realised he was “addicted to singing”.

Indeed, throughout our conversation he keeps breaking into song – to illustrate the difference between the straightforward singing of the classic soul sound and the melismatic vocals of modern R&B, or just as a reaction to something I have said (“Hey! Let me tell you, baby!” he croons, after I suggest that telling interviewers he has no charisma is an unusual thing for an aspirant pop star to do).

One thing Bridges has noticed since he began touring a year or so ago is the nature of his audience. “I have a song called Brown Skinned Girl, and I ask ‘Where my brown-skinned girls at?’ And there’s maybe one or two in the crowd. It’s a little awkward sometimes.” When he played at London’s Lexington earlier this year it was noticeable that he was fronting an all-white band in front of what appeared to be an all-white crowd. “My people most likely be at the hip-hop concert,” he observes.

Harding says that’s been his experience in the UK, too, though in the US “I play to all sorts of people. Here in Atlanta I have all-black crowds sometimes. Within my band I don’t want to have an all-white band or an all-black band, ’cos that’s not what it’s about. You go back to the days of Muscle Shoals and Stax, and there were different colours of musicians playing that stuff, man. That’s the way it should be.”

There’s little doubt, though, that in the UK at least, the classic soul revival is being marketed to an older, whiter audience. Bridges is currently playlisted on Radio 2 and 6 Music, but not on Radio 1 and certainly not on 1Xtra. Craig Charles, who has a Saturday-evening funk and soul show on 6 Music as well as DJing in clubs, says it was ever thus. That’s not a new phenomenon. “The whole northern soul scene was white,” he says. “Some black people who went to those events suffered racism. I suppose young black people are always looking to be ahead of the curve – in the 70s, rather than northern soul, black people were into P-Funk and Earth, Wind and Fire, and so on, not the 60s soul. Now black people have moved on from soul to dubstep and hip-hop. I think white and black musical youth are almost a generation apart.”

Harding thinks the current upsurge of interest in classic soul is another case of what goes around, comes around. “That’s just the way people are. That’s what we do. We have a tendency to look back every 20 years or so. But I do also know that people know what’s real and good and what’s not.”

Both Jeff Smith of Radio 2 and Charles reckon this new wave of soul singers have a chance of making it. Smith points out how the likes of Emeli Sandé, Adele and Sam Smith have opened the doors for musicians making soulful, song-based music. Charles observes that where the crowds when he DJed used to be “men my age wearing Shermans. Now there’s girls in their 20s and teenagers.” And, he points out, while every other genre has its deniers, you never hear anyone say how much they hate classic soul. “It’s attracted the best writers, the best singers and the best musicians,” he says. “So you are going to make the best records.”